Artist: Broken Lock
Label: ZARŠ Records
Release: 2009
Rating: 4.5/5
Bela Krajina’s Broken Lock are finally back with their third studio album, the deeply confessional “Want To Exit This Ergastulum?”, their first in seven years and the third studio outing in the band’s 15-year career.
Despite the basic setup of “different” rock music, this band puts a strong emphasis on melodic integration (which only creeps under your skin after repeated listens) and on building a high-drama ambience. They can’t stay with the lead motifs for long, so over the album’s running time a whole lot of interesting stuff happens. The guys can roll out boulder-heavy riffs that barely escape the triviality of minimalism, and then back them with complex rhythmic textures (the opener Oh I, plus Wish and Lucrative Deals). Add a dynamic, lively bass line, which stands out in contrast especially in the calm ambient stretches, with a warm and full tone (especially on the closer Medea), and that makes three contrasts already (guitar, drums, bass) that, with the right production, can deliver a powerful and high-quality record, one that came into the world in the Valley of St. Florian. And the production is excellent. It captured the liveliness and brought out the spots that have to stand out on the album to land such a strong message! So yes! The new album is an absolute step up from both its predecessors, in terms of both expression and production. With this album, Broken Lock have defined their own artistic core even more clearly.
The alternative flavor comes mostly from the vocals. A dizzied vocal that can satisfy fans of simple alternative statements as well as those of you hunting for experimentation, musical exotica and avant-garde tinkering. If I were to pick a sacrificial lamb here, say Kamnik’s Corkscrew, whose record literally forces “differentness” on the listener (unconvincingly, sadly), the difference is that Broken Lock don’t show a single shred of confusion. They’re perfectly clear in their expression and know and understand exactly the vision they’re following. The vocals feel the verses deeply and are an important element that breathes a shocking, unsettling reality into their message, or to put it plainly, keeps the album’s consumer constantly busy. It forces the listener to explore the world right alongside it. The vocals are often run through distortion effects, which further highlights the message of certain moments in the verses (Chwrw).
Broken Lock are seasoned, and the album doesn’t hide that one bit. They’re not hotheaded, rashly naive rebels, and they know how to build vibrant moods in a calm, undulating, slowly graded way. A typical example is the track Ignorant Devil, which opens through exploratory guitar ornaments and repeating patterns that create a hypnotic atmosphere, almost like the one typical of post rock bands. In L1, too, the band doesn’t charge starving into rock’s hangman’s noose, but lets the song unfold through measured and balanced strings and combinations of simple guitar patterns, which move colorfully from distortion to a clean tone, backed by reverb, of the repeating patterns. And in this highly ambient, dynamic persuasiveness the vocals are a decisive building block, burning both in the subtlety, where it strings verses together almost as narration in places, and in the explosive abrasion within the riffs. They use a similar trick to L1 again in Tunning Lower, but melodically they work an arabesque into the core of the song, and the thing again succeeds in unsettling you when it starts to smell of the Balkan Peninsula. So there’s definitely more hiding in this album than the superficial first “glance” picks up.
The energy of this album, and of Broken Lock with it, is special and rare on the Slovenian scene. Broken Lock are mightily strong in the rhythm section, and they sound live even in the studio, with an atmosphere that’s gloomy, hopeless, doomed and free of any illusion that life might be sweet and the path we walk paved with flowers. Both the complex textures and the lead motifs, which deliberately look for the notes between the notes, at times come across in experiment mode like playing by ear, which adds a feeling of spontaneity and unpredictability to the record. But nothing feels forced, it flows nicely, and it has a red thread and a sense of motif. The dark, almost eerie mood of Chwrw is suddenly lit up by sunshine in a calm passage right before the last repeat of the chorus, where the band sends the listener off toward a completely different vibe.
This is an album carrying songs seasoned with a whole bagful of “disconnected” and unexpected motif swerves and experiments with different sounds, where the guys defy a low budget with the innate genius of their own talent for the musical artistry that builds the spirit of Broken Lock. In other words, with genuine ideas. The band knows how to keep this album lively and dynamic. A brilliant example is the song Bleeding Hands, where, within a polished, compact verse-chorus relationship of high functionality, the band even works in an element of dub music. And Merlijn, with its power of contrast between verse and chorus, stands out most effectively on the album.
“Want To Exit This Ergastulum?” is a unique album that can boast a one-of-a-kind, recognizable stamp of its own expression, through the way it perceives and delivers the energy we call music. Taking all its building blocks together, we can safely file it under avant-garde, or at the very least art rock. It feels progressive, it feels exploratory, and it artfully combines rock directness with experimental touches. An excellent achievement with a singular character, towering high above the general average of Slovenian intellect in rock music. An achievement that will and must grab attention abroad, where, let’s hope, it will help the band break new ground on the way to recognition on the international stage. Let’s just hope we won’t have to wait another seven years for the next Broken Lock album.
Lineup
Rihard Zupančič – vocals, guitar
Janez Weiss – guitar, backing vocals
Jure Vlahovič – sound effects
Marko Brodica – bass guitar
Julij Karin – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Dennis Breganovich (Kiki) – trombone & synthesizers on tracks #4 and #5
Production
Dave Collins
Tracklist
1. Oh-I
2. Ignorant Devil
3. Chwrw
4. Bleeding Hands
5. Merlijn
6. Wish
7. L1
8. Tunning Lower
9. Lucrative Deals
10. Venice
11. Medea
